The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life PDF Author: Megan Stielstra
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062429213
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Powerful, personal observations on fear and courage—that touch on art, faith, academia, the internet, and more—from “a masterful essayist” (Roxane Gay, New York Times–bestselling author of Hunger). In this poignant and thoughtful collection of literary essays, Megan Stielstra tells stories to ward off fears both personal and universal as she grapples toward a better way to live. In “The Wrong Way to Save Your Life,” she answers the question of what has value in our lives—a question no longer rhetorical when the apartment above her family’s goes up in flames. “Here is My Heart” sheds light on Megan’s close relationship with her father, whose continued insistence on climbing mountains despite a series of heart attacks leads the author to dissect deer hearts in a poetic attempt to interrogate her own feelings about mortality. Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own. “Sensitive and funny . . . She has a flair for nostalgia and for cultural criticism that is never pretentious.” —Publishers Weekly “When Megan Stielstra writes you can actually feel her beautiful heart pumping blood through every sentence.” —Samantha Irby, New York Times–bestselling author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life “A life-enriching collection of essays.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Reading this book is like listening to stories from a wise, compassionate, and irrepressibly funny friend.” —Esme Weijun Wang, award-winning author of The Border of Paradise

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life PDF Author: Megan Stielstra
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062429213
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
Powerful, personal observations on fear and courage—that touch on art, faith, academia, the internet, and more—from “a masterful essayist” (Roxane Gay, New York Times–bestselling author of Hunger). In this poignant and thoughtful collection of literary essays, Megan Stielstra tells stories to ward off fears both personal and universal as she grapples toward a better way to live. In “The Wrong Way to Save Your Life,” she answers the question of what has value in our lives—a question no longer rhetorical when the apartment above her family’s goes up in flames. “Here is My Heart” sheds light on Megan’s close relationship with her father, whose continued insistence on climbing mountains despite a series of heart attacks leads the author to dissect deer hearts in a poetic attempt to interrogate her own feelings about mortality. Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own. “Sensitive and funny . . . She has a flair for nostalgia and for cultural criticism that is never pretentious.” —Publishers Weekly “When Megan Stielstra writes you can actually feel her beautiful heart pumping blood through every sentence.” —Samantha Irby, New York Times–bestselling author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life “A life-enriching collection of essays.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Reading this book is like listening to stories from a wise, compassionate, and irrepressibly funny friend.” —Esme Weijun Wang, award-winning author of The Border of Paradise

Everyone Remain Calm

Everyone Remain Calm PDF Author: Megan Stielstra
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081014395X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
The stories in Everyone Remain Calm reveal landscapes where the surreal and the familiar clash, to visceral effect. A woman yearns for—and dreads—the snowfall that arrives whenever her ex-boyfriend returns to the home she shares with their son. Another character reassures herself after breakups by seeking out the monster under her bed, the Incredible Hulk himself, for rebound sex that can be hot, heavy, and unnerving. Marching bands blare all the way from New Orleans to the Midwest. There are wild shootouts, rising tides, and perils embedded in the act of storytelling itself. “There are words that can kill you if you’re not careful,” Stielstra writes. And the stories we tell ourselves are the most fantastic tales of all. Everyone Remain Calm is eerie, hilarious, moving, and down-to-earth, even as its characters defy the rules—sometimes in the ways we wish we could.

Once I Was Cool

Once I Was Cool PDF Author: Megan Stielstra
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810143933
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Once I Was Cool contrasts past aspirations with the mess and magic of the present. In her younger days, essayist Megan Stielstra saw Jane’s Addiction at the Aragon Ballroom and fantasized about living on the same block, right in the thick of music and revelry. As an adult, she lives in a turreted condo across the street, with her husband, a child, and an onerous mortgage. It’s just the home her young, cool self imagined. And it isn’t what she expected, either. With conversational flourishes and on-the-mark descriptions, Stielstra’s essays evoke the richness of her everyday life and the memories that are never far away. She remembers learning how to shoot a gun, a cancer scare, and—in a piece that was anthologized in The Best American Essays 2013—the time she eavesdropped on another new mother using her son’s baby monitor. “I shouldn’t have listened,” she writes. “But it was the first time since my son was born that I didn’t feel alone.” Combining footnotes, electric sentences, and uproariously funny anecdotes (have you ever run into an ex while rolling on ecstasy?), Stielstra shows us that maturity is demanding, but its rewards are a gift.

Keep Moving

Keep Moving PDF Author: Maggie Smith
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982132086
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The NATIONAL BESTSELLER from the author of YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL “A meditation on kindness and hope, and how to move forward through grief.” —NPR “A shining reminder to learn all we can from this moment, rebuilding ourselves in the darkness so that we may come out wiser, kinder, and stronger on the other side.” —The Boston Globe “Powerful essays on loss, endurance, and renewal.” —People For fans of Glennon Doyle, Cheryl Strayed, and Anne Lamott, a collection of quotes and essays on facing life’s challenges with creativity, courage, and resilience. When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing inspirational daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?

The Chronology of Water

The Chronology of Water PDF Author: Lidia Yuknavitch
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
ISBN: 0983304904
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This is not your mother’s memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose. What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, and Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn’t last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and a teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive.

Long Way Down

Long Way Down PDF Author: Jason Reynolds
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481438271
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.

The Life You Can Save

The Life You Can Save PDF Author: Peter Singer
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812981561
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Argues that for the first time in history we're in a position to end extreme poverty throughout the world, both because of our unprecedented wealth and advances in technology, therefore we can no longer consider ourselves good people unless we give more to the poor. Reprint.

I'm the One Who Got Away

I'm the One Who Got Away PDF Author: Andrea Jarrell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1631522612
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
As featured in the New York Times “Modern Love” column * a Redbook Magazine must-read * Rumpus, Hello Giggles, Bustle, and Southern Living magazine Fall book pick Fugitives from a man as alluring as he is violent, Andrea Jarrell and her mother develop a powerful, unusual bond. Once grown, Jarrell thinks she’s put that chapter of her life behind her—until a woman she knows is murdered, and she suddenly sees that it’s her mother’s choices she’s been trying to escape all along. Without preaching or prescribing, I’m the One Who Got Away is a life-affirming story of having the courage to become both safe enough and vulnerable enough to love and be loved.

I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was PDF Author: Barbara Sher
Publisher: Dell
ISBN: 0440505003
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A life-changing guide to finding your direction—and your passion—in a world of seemingly limitless options “For those who want to find their passion . . . a step-by-step guide for restructuring one’s life so that it has meaning, direction, and joy.”—Ellen Kreidman, author of Light His Fire and Light Her Fire If you suspect there could be more to life than what you’re getting, if you always knew you could do anything—if you only knew what it was—this extraordinary book is about to prove you right. No matter what your age, no matter how “unattainable” your dreams, you can create and live a life you love. I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was reveals how you can recapture “long lost” goals, overcome the blocks that inhibit your success, decide what you want to be, and live your dreams forever. You will learn: • What to do if you never chose to be what you are. • How to get off the fast track—and on to the right track. • First aid techniques for paralyzing chronic negativity. • How to regroup when you've lost your big dream. • To stop waiting for luck—and start creating it. A life without direction is a life without passion. I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was guides you not to another unsatisfying job but to a richly rewarding career rooted in your heart’s desire.

The Sun Does Shine

The Sun Does Shine PDF Author: Anthony Ray Hinton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250124719
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
"A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit"--